RippleRap Update

February has been a slow month, partly due to several Osmosoftonians taking holidays (including me), but also other commitments have taken precedent. However we are still on track to present RippleRap at BlogTalk (3-4 March 2008), and we're already close to having a version ready to go based on the version used at Le Web.

The main development in the last week or so has been the creation of an agenda-builder by Paul Downey. There are two parts to this; scraping agendas from conference websites, and creating them in RippleRap. The former has turned out to be pretty difficult, because very few conference organisers are using standard formats (such as microformats) yet. So Paul's focus has been on creating a form that allows people to manually create an agenda item complete with microformat-goodness. First efforts can be seen here. This week we'll be focusing on getting the agenda into the BlogTalk edition.

Secondly, Phil Hawksworth has created a Twitter client that allows users to send updates straight from the RippleRap, as well as viewing their own twitter timeline in RippleRap. The main benefit here is that conference wi-fi goes up and down, but your latest history will always be visible. This tool will be integrated into the BlogTalk edition when Phil returns from holiday on Wednesday.

Finally, we're starting to look at the dashboard view, a.k.a. the event stream, this week. There's a photo of the paper prototype here. Jon Lister will be amending his RSS feed compiler for this.

So all activity now is focused on BlogTalk, including cross browser compatibility and other testing. All code commits can be seen in subversion, and work to make all this stuff easier to consume (including an overhaul of RippleRap.com) will take place when we get back...!

UPDATE 25/2: One thing I forgot to mention is that we haven't yet conducted any user testing on the paper prototype. That is scheduled for sometime in March; I'll keep you posted.